Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Posts published by Don Gomez

Standing shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of heavily armed paratroopers, I looked around at all of us, breathing heavily, angry and resentful, surrounding the Baya mosque in Baghdad. The previous morning, we had arrested the head imam because he was stockpiling weapons in the mosque. Now, under amber street lamps casting wicked shadows, his followers were gathered, demanding his release. My adrenaline was still pumping from the explosion minutes earlier, when one of them tossed a grenade at our line of troops, injuring more than a half-dozen soldiers and civilians. After that, order descended into a running street battle, soldiers wrestling protesters, bodies slamming into the hard concrete. Months of pent-up aggression were suddenly released in a cathartic, chaotic performance.

After that initial fit of violence, things were calming down. We had them surrounded, cornered, their backs to the mosque. Sweat ran down from under my helmet and into my eyes as I struggled to make out the mass of bodies in front of me, searching for a gleam of metal, the shine of a worn-out AK-47. They chanted at us: “America equals Saddam” and “Down down, U.S.A.!”

Imams with dark beards and large black turbans walked among the protesters, handing out bread and tea as our sergeants trooped the line in front of us, yelling and ensuring that we were packed tight next to one another like a Roman phalanx.

Behind us I could hear the rumble of Humvees and tanks, their guns canted over our heads, seemingly trained toward the dome and minaret of the mosque. Above us two helicopters circled, buzzing low, shining their industrial-strength spotlights on the crowd of protesting Iraqis. Hundreds of troops, tanks, Humvees and helicopters. All of this American firepower, focused on the people and the building in front of us, the mosque.

The situation was tense. One panicky soldier, one itchy trigger finger, and there would be a massacre. I was scared.

Off to my right I saw a squad of American soldiers turn to chase someone into an alley, loudly knocking over some garbage cans and startling us all. I laughed nervously and turned to the soldier next to me and said, “I know we’re not at war with Islam, but if someone took a picture right now. …”

That was Oct. 7, 2003. That was the day that the war ended for me.

I was there for the invasion when it was about finding illicit weapons and taking out Mr. Hussein and going home. I was sure that I would be home in time for burgers and fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The summer passed, and I was still there. Hot, miserable and not understanding what I was doing anymore. The insurgency began. We started getting hit more and more frequently. The looks from Iraqis on the street became darker and darker. I could no longer disarm anyone with a smile.

I’ve told this story a hundred times, refining it and polishing it and punching it up. It’s just as true as any war story ever was. It is the story I think about the most. It’s the thing I think about when I think about where it went wrong, where it ended or where it began to end. After that night, the war was never the same. The cool demeanor I prided myself on before was gone, replaced instead with a semi-panicky hypervigilance. I was a soldier determined to get home.

I cringed a little harder when we drove down the bomb-laden streets. When the platoon leader asked for volunteers, I looked around to see if anyone else would raise his hand first. My eyes flicked nonstop to every window we passed, every rooftop. My default reaction to anything I heard from anyone was distrust.

I was sadder when I called home.

Shortly after the protest, we moved from our small, company-size firebase to a new, megaforward operating base, complete with its own dining facility, dormitories, air-conditioning and showers. It was a welcome and wonderful change of pace from the spartan conditions we had endured since deploying earlier in the year.

The riot at the Baya mosque coupled with the move to the F.O.B. marked the beginning of the end of the war for me. I barely felt it then — just a deep-inside, tingling concern about what we were doing. I didn’t know what it was; I just knew I wanted to go home.

But it was the tipping point. If I were asked to look back and pick a time and place at which losing felt inevitable, at which the population turned from cautious supporters to cynics, that would be it. It was the day that I realized that winning from here on out meant simply not losing.

I’m sure every soldier has a story of where his or her war begins and where it ends. This one is mine.

Don Gomez is an Army officer. You can follow him on Twitter: @dongomezjr.

Commune and Yippy forces at the City College of New York gathered to watch military trainees crawling on the ground during R.O.T.C training in 1968.Credit Eddie Hausner/The New York Times

When I attended City College a few years ago and spoke with college officials about bringing back the Reserve Officer Training Corps, or R.O.T.C., they dismissed the idea as impossible. The wounds from those wild days during the Vietnam War were still too raw. But in an afternoon ceremony on Tuesday that Colin Powell — the former secretary of state and retired four-star general who happens to be a City College graduate — is expected to attend, Army R.O.T.C. will be welcomed back to the City University of New York, with its headquarters at City College.

Photo

Don Gomez at the student veteran club office at the City University of New York.Credit Courtesy Don Gomez

The return of R.O.T.C. deserves to be celebrated. Its removal in the early 1970s, when opposition to the war in Vietnam had reached its zenith, left only ghosts.

In the spring of 1969, according to City College’s student newspaper, The Campus, student anti-war activists disrupted an R.O.T.C. recruitment event by dumping buckets of ox blood on the registration table as baffled officers and students looked on. It was one of numerous examples of how the boutique R.O.T.C. program at City College, once the largest in the nation, had become embattled as a symbol of American power.

The campus had become an ideological battlefield, pitting anti-war activists against hired security guards and the New York City Police Department. Sit-ins and protest marches were a daily occurrence. Bomb threats to Harris Hall, home of the R.O.T.C. office, were typical, causing many evacuations. Masked men and women banged on doors to disrupt R.O.T.C. classes until professors dismissed the cadets for the day. Student activists held counter-marching formations on campus, walking alongside the cadets during their drills, cursing them and carrying the black flag of anarchy next to the cadets’ American flag.

Photo

Students of the City College of New York mimicked an R.O.T.C. exercise in 1968.Credit Eddie Hausner/The New York Times

Through all this, the young cadets were urged to exercise restraint and ignore the protestors. In an effort to calm the escalating tensions, the college banned cadets from wearing or even displaying their uniforms on campus.

The culminating moment came in May 1970, when a general student strike on campus in the wake of the Kent State shootings turned into an attack on R.O.T.C. Protest leaders led hundreds of students to Harris Hall, where they broke down the doors using a bench. The students rushed the halls and offices, burning military uniforms, smashing plaques, defacing property and scribbling anti-military graffiti on the walls.

The next day, the college condemned the attacks in the strongest language, with the acting president of City College calling the activists “complete dropouts from the human species.”

The damage, however, was done. R.O.T.C. was no longer welcome on campus. Years of harassment coupled with the coalescing anti-war sentiment across the country led to a sharp decline in R.O.T.C. registration at City College.

In March 1971, the faculty senate recommended removal of R.O.T.C. from campus. The official reason, they said, was that the amount of space allocated to R.O.T.C. was disproportionate to the number of students served by the program, though the general animosity towards R.O.T.C. was almost certainly a factor.

Even as they negotiated the removal of the program from campus, the faculty senate and college president went out of their way to sing the praises of R.O.T.C. and bemoan the tensions. But the die was cast.

In the 40 years that followed, CUNY students interested in serving as officers had to attend R.O.T.C. classes at other schools, like Fordham. The absence of R.O.T.C. on CUNY campuses meant the Army lost access to the talent pool at one of the most diverse universities in the United States.

After the loss of R.O.T.C., other military-related programs at City College began to vanish. The Office of Veterans Affairs closed its doors, the student-veteran run newspaper, The Observation Post, shut down, and the City College Veterans Association — the student-veteran club on campus — slowly disbanded.

When I arrived at City College in 2007, after having left the Army, there was little evidence of the military on campus beyond a statue of the college’s second president, Major General Alexander Webb, recipient of the Medal of Honor, and references to General Powell’s years there. Students passed the statue on their way to classes, oblivious of the history of the grounds they walked. In an American history class, the professor asked us how many service members had died in Iraq. A girl sitting near the front responded, “Um, something like 30 or 40.” The actual number had just surpassed 4,000. The students on campus were completely divorced from the military. The war just didn’t matter to them.

With its return, R.O.T.C. will not only provide interested students the opportunity to seek commissions in the Army. It will also allow non-R.O.T.C. students to enroll in some R.O.T.C. classes, like military science. That interaction could help bridge the much-debated civilian-military divide, which seems to have grown over the last 40 years as fewer Americans have served in the armed forces.

Walking the campus today, those old ghosts have faded. A growing and active student-veteran population flourishes on campus and is welcomed by fellow students. And while City College is still a beacon for tough debate, it is no longer the cauldron of fiery protest it was in the 1960s. Times have changed. And perhaps one legacy of Vietnam is the belief that how we treat those who serve, or wish to serve, in the military need not be tied to our feelings about American foreign policy.

Don Gomez is a graduate of the City College of New York and an officer in the United States Army. Twitter: @dongomezjr

This week, The Times will feature reflections on the 10th anniversary of the invasion. We invite anyone who was directly affected by the invasion to submit their essays via atwar@nytimes.com. Please keep pieces to 500 words.

Soldiers in Kuwait prepped for a scud attack on March 19, 2003.Credit Don Gomez

“We launched some cruise missiles this morning or something. The war is officially on,” he said with the smug satisfaction of being the first to know.

“We’ll see,” I said. I had imagined being informed through some official authority, not a random soldier happy from another gorging on bread rolls and Kuwaiti yogurt.

I’d been here since Valentine’s Day. I had just turned 21. This was the longest I’d been away from home since basic training a couple of years earlier and the first time I’d left America.

Kuwait was a staging area and proving ground for the impending war. We spent each day training with an intensity I had never experienced. If we were not sharpening our marksmanship on some spartan desert range or preparing for violent house-to-house urban warfare in an abandoned Kuwaiti cityscape, we were toughening our bodies to the increasingly hot climate through twice-daily workouts, practicing how we would don our protective masks if we were attacked with chemicals, receiving intelligence updates on the Iraqi military’s latest movements, or packing and repacking our war gear.

Little time was wasted. It was exhausting and exhilarating. We moved with the certainty that each moment mattered. We believed that careful, disciplined preparation would ensure that we accomplished our mission and that it would increase our chances of coming home to tell the story.

Now, though, we were growing impatient. Saddam Hussein was stalling, like calling a timeout to ice a field goal kicker on the 10-yard line. We’d been ready to go for weeks, and felt like we were losing our edge. Plus, it grew hotter every day and we dreaded a fight in the extreme Iraqi heat.

At the chow hall, I moved through the line with my tray, cranking my head to watch the talking head on the giant projected television to see if we were at war. This screen was our only link to the outside world. The average American who scanned the cable news ticker in the morning knew more than we did.

After filling my tray, I sat down to eat. Normally there was no sound, but someone had set up speakers. The news anchor in the United States was talking with a journalist embedded with the Marines somewhere along the Iraq-Kuwait border. They were all wearing chemical suits and protective masks and talking about retaliatory missile attacks. Sucks to be them, I thought.

Suddenly, like a receding wave, the chow hall grew silent except for the sound of Wolf Blitzer’s voice. From outside, a terrifying wailing siren penetrated the thick cloth tent. We paused for the longest second before simultaneously realizing that, yes, we too were possibly in danger. Hundreds of soldiers reacted like they were under assault from bees, furiously standing and grabbing for their gas masks. Chairs toppled over. Atropine needles we kept in our bags to counter nerve agent spilled onto the wood floor.

I opened my case and pulled my mask out as I had practiced hundreds of times. I remembered that I was supposed to stop breathing, so I stopped, the sudden shutdown of my respiratory system instantly elevating my panic. I wondered briefly if I’d already been poisoned. I tightened my mask on my face, placed my hand over the air intake on the filter and breathed in deeply, ensuring that my mask was sealed.

I shuffled with the crowds pushing to the exit. I passed many soldiers who seemed to have no idea how to put their masks on and others who looked more embarrassed than scared that they did not have one.

Outside, the siren blared deafeningly. The omnipotent “voice of God” — some duty officer — let us know there was an incoming Scud missile. Soldiers with gas masks and guns — chemical superheroes — ran in all directions. It felt like the end of the world.

As I ran toward my unit area, my face flushed with heat and sweat and soon my mask was thoroughly fogged. Before I could get very far, another soldier grabbed me and pulled me into a small concrete bunker.

“I have to get back to my unit!” I pleaded.

“You won’t make it!” he said, clearly frightened.

I sat crouched against a wall of that bunker with him and others, strangers all breathing heavily together through our masks. Our eyes darted around in the large eye ports, making brief contact with one another, looking for reassurance but finding more panic. The siren continued. It suggested, “This is it; ready yourself.”

A couple of guys high-fived, boasting, “We just earned our combat patch, baby!” I thought about my unit, and waited for the Scud missile to crash into us.

Then, God’s voice announced that the Scud missile had been intercepted. Our masks came off. We were at war.

During those days in Kuwait, we were blissfully ignorant. We believed that what we were about to do was important and just. Among us, there were few cynics. We trained hard and when we crossed the border, we fought like tigers.

Almost a year later, I spent a couple of days at that same camp in Kuwait en route home for two weeks of leave. The tents were gone, replaced with semipermanent structures, coffee shops and fast food huts. I remember feeling infuriated that someone had transformed my precombat staging ground into a playground.

I sneered at the other soldiers stationed there who called home nightly to tell their family and friends about the “war.” I thought that war was over.

But I know now that it had only just begun.

Don Gomez is an old enlisted infantryman and a new infantry officer. During the invasion of Iraq, he served with the 82nd Airborne Division. He blogs at Carrying the Gun. Twitter: @dongomezjr

If former Senator Chuck Hagel, who will be heading to confirmation hearings on Thursday, is confirmed, he will become the first former enlisted soldier to lead the Pentagon. As a young man, he served as a sergeant, a noncommissioned officer with the infantry in Vietnam, earning two Purple Hearts and the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge. While military service is not a prerequisite to serving as defense secretary, previous secretaries who have served in the military have all been officers. I have no opinion on whether his enlisted background will make Mr. Hagel a better steward of the huge Pentagon bureaucracy and budget. But I do know that there are qualities of enlisted experience, and especially the nature of enlisted leadership, that differentiates it from the officer corps and makes it unique and worthy of admiration.

Having served as both an enlisted infantryman and now as an officer, I’ve seen both sides. There are lessons that I learned through the experience of being enlisted that I most likely would never have attained as an officer. These are lessons that go beyond having to do some of the less glamorous Army tasks, like cleaning latrines or burning and stirring human excrement (although there are certainly important lessons to be learned there). Rather, these lessons have to do with raw leadership, and the value of shared hardship.

In one of those moments, in which time and boredom make everyone on a deployment more candid than they ought to be, I remember saying to an infantry officer, “If all of the officers disappeared tomorrow, the Army would go on running just fine.” I was laughing as I said it, but at the time, I kind of meant it.

I was a young sergeant who had deployed a couple of times to Iraq as an infantryman. My experience on the ground informed my understanding of how war worked. Out on patrol, there was rarely an officer around. On bigger missions, the officers paced about, quickly moving between groups of soldiers with their entourage, which we called the “antenna farm.” They spoke to each other on radios, their intensity and persistence in keeping order and maintaining communication making them seemingly oblivious to the dangers around them. We’d shake our heads as one would approach us and ask for some strange, seemingly trivial piece of information.

“How many blue two-door cars have you seen in the past five minutes?” an officer might ask, waiting on the response as if it contained the key to winning the war.

“Huh? I’m just a grunt, sir. I’m pulling security down this road” might be the reply.

“Roger” the officer would say and then bolt off to some other location.

That constant communication and collection of information was how an officer painted the picture of the battlefield for himself and others, but to us, the only thing that mattered was what was right in front of us.

I understand better now that he was most likely just cutting through the chain of command to confirm or deny a key piece of information he needed to make a decision. From the perspective of the grunt, though, it can just seem silly.

Grunt. The name seems derogatory and suggests the low, guttural sound, but in military circles it is synonymous with “infantry” and is a privileged title that is earned through pain and sacrifice. And with it comes a special knowledge that can be accessed only through being and doing.

My direct supervisors were noncommissioned officers, and they led me in combat, and when I became an NCO, I led others. When our platoon leader (the only officer in the platoon) left Iraq for a new assignment, we got along just fine when the senior sergeant in our platoon took his place. I knew the officers did something; it just didn’t appear to affect me at my level.

Our platoon was able to function without an officer because of the quality of the noncommissioned officers the Army produces.

There are things that the enlisted learn that set them apart from the officer corps. These are the raw lessons that come from the hard-earned experience of being and doing. The pain and shame of making a legitimate error and having it exposed in front of your peers. Being corrected over and over again for tiny infractions. Leaving your barracks room — your home — and being immediately questioned as to whether you shaved this morning. The general fear of the forever-hovering NCO, a fear that is inculcated during basic training from the ever-present drill sergeant.

This experience leads to learning the things that officers may understand academically, but not viscerally. The officer knows why a given policy is important, but the enlisted feels it. It is the reason every officer in a command position is paired with a more experienced NCO. Together they form the command team, and good officers tend to take the advice of the good NCOs who surround them. Good officers know that their NCOs know a lot more about what is going on around them because they are always there.

In the case of the infantry, when a soldier is promoted to sergeant and becomes a team leader, it comes with an awesome responsibility. He moves from being a rifleman among riflemen to the guy up front, the one who walks point, the one who sniffs out the enemy. He literally leads from the front, every day. He places himself where his subordinates can see him. He is the first to rush toward the sound of gunfire, asking nothing of his soldiers that he wouldn’t do himself. He sets the pace, and over time his team will start to embody the same traits as he.

The infantry team leader is often called “the hardest-working man in the Army” because he is an action leader, a fighting leader. As NCOs get promoted, and as is certainly the case with the officer corps, leaders begin to move further and further from the point of contact and become managers of soldiers or groups of soldiers. Whereas junior NCOs need to be aggressive, energetic and enthusiastic, senior NCOs and officers require a more measured disposition, calmness amid confusion, and they need the ability to know when to rein in those aggressive junior NCOs.

Generally, officers tend to think “up and out.” Their concern is with the big picture, how their role influences and affects the overall effort. NCOs think about the “here and now.” Their concern is with what’s around them and how to constantly improve that position. This is not to say that one doesn’t think about the other, but, rather, each has a role and tends to focus on it a little more than the other. It’s commonly said that it is the officers’ job to focus on the mission, and it is the NCO’s job to focus on the men. While both leaders need to think about the mission and the men, the different experiences and training of these two leaders tend to nudge them slightly toward one edge of the spectrum.

Of course, none of this is to say that officers are oblivious to the needs of their men or what is going on around them. Likewise, NCOs are not simply laser-focused on “beans and bullets,” but lost when it comes to the big picture. It has been my experience that the Army produces officers and NCOs who often exhibit the best of both of these traits. Together, they provide the best leadership for America’s sons and daughters who serve.

Don Gomez is an old enlisted infantryman and a new infantry officer in the United States Army. Follow him on Twitter.

Under a blue, cloudless sky I waddled along the flight line toward a waiting C-130 Hercules. This was going to be my second jump, and the first with combat equipment. The day prior I had taken my first jump, and with four more I would earn my Airborne wings. I was nervous about getting injured.

My shoulders strained under the weight of the extra gear as I clumsily placed one foot in front of the other, trying to keep up with the taller soldiers in front of me. Our long green line snaked closer to the aircraft, the engines roaring loudly, drowning out everything except for the sound of my own thoughts. I nearly bumped into the soldier in front of me when the slow march suddenly stopped. Our airborne instructor halted us and walked toward the aircraft to meet with an excited airman rushing out of it. They exchanged a few words, and our leader turned us around and told us to head back into the passenger shed. Read more…

It is not uncommon for politicians, media figures and the general public to claim – without question – that those serving in the armed forces are heroes. Military service is unique, and the challenges faced by service members are unlike those of other professions. Violent death is a real possibility while wearing a service uniform. But does this make everyone who served a hero?

Like many veterans, I’ve been called a hero for my military service. As I see it, I didn’t accomplish anything extraordinary during my time in the Army or my two tours in Iraq. I did my job. I had good days and I had bad days. Yes, on really bad days things were nasty and might involve multiple fiery explosions or being under severely oppressive heat for hours, wearing a full kit. Despite these hardships, I tried, generally, to do as good a job as I could while serving, and I left military service honorably. Even though I didn’t participate in any solitary acts of heroism, like jumping on a grenade or being the guy who got Osama bin Laden, there are many who would say I am a hero for doing what others would not while putting myself at extreme risk.

I understand the sentiment, and I trust that there are those who truly believe that all service members are heroes, simply for signing up. But I can’t help think that for some, “hero” is a throw-away word, designed to demonstrate a “support the troops” position or guarantee applause at an event.

For this new generation of veterans, the term “hero” usually comes partnered with the decision to join the military during a time of war, after 9/11, when deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan was all but guaranteed. I unheroically joined before 9/11, in April 2001, having barely graduated high school and after a semester toying with community college. My goal was to straighten myself out and figure out what I wanted out of life, while being somewhat productive and useful. In the Army I joined, the dreaded assignment was not a 15-month deployment to the “Triangle of Death” or Helmand province, but a yearlong “hardship” tour to South Korea or peacekeeping duty in Kosovo.

The peacetime Army I joined disappeared while I was in Airborne school at Fort Benning on Sept. 11, 2001. I was only a trainee, fresh out of basic training, but I saw it in the faces of the lifers; the Army just got real. Years later, in conversations about my service, I’m often asked when I joined, and being young, I can sense that the inquisitor anticipates the response that I joined after 9/11, fully knowing the dangerous consequences that I would have faced. They are ready to applaud me for being so brave. I can see their enthusiasm wash from their face when I inform them that, no, I did not join knowing I would go to war. “But surely you would have joined after 9/11, right?” Not actually knowing the answer to that question, I can only respond with, “I don’t know.” “Well, you’re a hero anyway…,” they say.

I don’t feel comfortable being called a hero. In fact, my brow furrows and my mind sharpens when I hear it. Words matter, and “hero” is so loaded and used so frequently that it stands to lose its meaning altogether. Maybe this is just New York cynicism, but I know I’m not the only veteran who feels skeptical when he or she is placed in the hero bin along with every other service member from the past 10 years. I admire the fact that men and women with whom I served chose a dangerous profession for their country – often making the decision after 9/11. But, these are soldiers. Soldiers are human beings. There are good ones and bad ones. A few do amazing, heroic things. The rest do their jobs – incredible, unique jobs – but jobs, nonetheless. Some perform happily, others grudgingly. And I argue that most feel embarrassed when lauded as heroes.

This sentiment is especially true, considering there are real heroes out there. Like Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, the first woman to receive the Silver Star since World War II for her role in crushing an enemy ambush on a supply convoy near Baghdad, helping to kill or capture an enemy force of 30 insurgents. And Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta, whose actions in Afghanistan in 2007 earned him the Medal of Honor, becoming the first living recipient of the award for this generation of veterans. He will soon be joined by Sgt. First Class Leroy Petry, who, after being shot through both of his legs, lost his hand in an attempt to throw back an enemy grenade in Afghanistan in 2008. His selfless action prevented his fellow Rangers from being wounded or killed.

Men and women like these are my heroes. To call everyone who puts on a uniform a hero cheapens these extraordinary actions. My fear is that being called a hero has become the new “thank you for your service.” That line, also awkwardly received by veterans everywhere, at least makes sense. Our nation has an all-volunteer military and military service can be tough, especially during war, so a thank you is appropriate and in good order.

Calling everyone a hero is unfair to the real heroes who accomplish extraordinary things. It’s also unfair to the rest of us who do important work, only to have it wiped away by being equated to the work of everyone else. Yes, people’s hearts are in the right place when they call us heroes. But I’d much rather a person struggle to understand what military service is all about, rather than just assume it’s all heroic, all the time. In a country where so few people serve in a military that plays such a prominent role in global affairs, a little understanding can go a long way.
Don Gomez is an Iraq War veteran and spokesman for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. He served two tours in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2003 and 2005. You can follow him on Twitter @dongomezjr.

In Britain, two news items dominated the airwaves this past weekend: the Eurovision Song Contest finale and the proposal to make into law the “military covenant” — the informal pact between the British government and members of the armed forces, promising fair treatment in return for military service. While the value of bringing something like Eurovision to the United States may be debatable, there may be value in exploring the military covenant, especially as a potential framework for bridging what we know as the civilian-military divide.

Don Gomez

The term “military covenant” was introduced in Britain in 2000 and is used by political leaders and the media in discussing the informal pact that exists between those who volunteered to serve in the British military and the nation. Its purpose is to ensure that those who served will be treated with respect and receive the benefits they’ve earned.Read more…

About

At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

Archive

Recent Posts

Marine Corps Captain Calum Rammhe, a longtime marathon runner, ran seven marathons on seven continents in seven days to raise money for a charity that supports wounded Marines and their families. It also let him reflect on why running is more than a hobby for him. Read more…